I went to Krakow, Poland for the weekend. I had to wake up at 3:30am and meet the others in the lobby. The metro wasn't running that early, so we all had to take two taxis. Our taxi driver gave us a sheet that told us what airlines left from what Terminal; according to this sheet, EasyJet (the airline we used) left from Terminal 3. On the way to the Terminal, I saw an electronic billboard that was saying something in French. The only words I recognized were "Easyjet" and "Terminal 2B". I tried pointing this out to the others, but they didn't really care that much. We got to Terminal 3 and saw a sign saying EasyJet had been moved to Terminal 2B. At this point we were starting to get worried that we'd miss our flight. We caught our Taxi driver after we had paid him and asked him to take us to Terminal 2B (at this point we were pretty mad; the sheet he had was outdated and it gave us the wrong information.) We got to 2B, met up with the others (who had been waiting for us) and proceeded to check in. We made it into the waiting room with time to spare, but Terminal 2B was old and rundown. There were no vending machines, and all of the food courts were closed. None of us had anything for breakfast except maybe a bowl of cereal or a granola bar, and the airplane didn't serve anything unless you paid for it (it was a budget airline like Ryan Air).
We were almost the first ones in the terminal, so we sat down near the front. They started boarding and we all got through except 1: her pre-flight check-in sheet was the for the flight FROM Krakow, not TO (the Website that they printed this all out from was to blame.) We all waited inside the port as other people passed us. The other girl had to go get her CORRECT flight info from the staff (she had gotten ALL this way and no one ever caught it; not even the check-in staff.) She finally made it, and we ended up being the last people on the airplane (remember that little detail).
We arrived in Krakow. Friday was good. Saturday we woke up and went to Auschwitz (including Birkenau). That trip alone was very, very powerful.
A sign saying "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes You Free) posted above an execution camp gate doesn't mean that anybody gets out of there alive, and a room labeled "Showers" doesn't necessarily make you clean.
I saw that very sign myself. Took a picture of it. Walked under it. Saw everything beyond it. And then I saw the hair, and the clothes, and personal belongings, and the pictures, and the tools, and the living conditions, and the crematoriums, and the remains of the showers, and the guard towers, and the barbed wire fences. I walked the same Earth that millions of people walked to their death at the hands of a madman. I left the grounds speechless.
We came home Sat. evening. That night I tried the credit card my parents gave me to pay for the hostel but it didn't work, so I went to an ATM and paid for it in cash (100zl = ~ $50). The room was taken care of, and so we all went out to a very nice dinner at a jazz club called Piano Rouge. I only got about $16 (32zl) worth of food, but the others kept ordering more and more. The final bill was 510zl ($255). By the time we were done with dinner, it was almost midnight (we got home very late from Auschwitz). We wandered around town a bit (Krakow has an active night life), and I had been thinking about how early we had to wake up to catch our flight and about the TIME CHANGE that night. The other's weren't so concerned about it. We got back to the hostel at about 1am, and I went to bed about 1:30. I was still really concerned about all of this. Two of them had alarm clocks and they INSISTED that it changed automatically for DST. I wasn't so sure, so to be on the safe side, one of the clocks was changed ahead an hour manually. We all went to bed knowing that we'd be waking up in about 4 hours.
Morning broke and the alarm went off at the set time. We all got ready and went down and checked out. We got a taxi to the airport and I went inside to get money to pay for the taxi (i got the money but it turns out I didn't need to do it, so I had an extra 100zl in my pocket that I would just have to exchange for Euros later....kind of a waste). As I walked out, the others told me that they found out what time it REALLY was: we were an hour late. We rushed inside but we missed our flight by a ridiculously large amount of time. There were no other flights to Paris from Krakow today, and we all had class tomorrow.
We went to the EasyJet desk and asked what we could do. After many long arduous minutes of standing and talking to the clerk and trying to figure out what our options were, she finally found us an indirect connection: We'd have to fly to Belfast (N. Ireland) and switch to a flight to Paris. Our tickets couldn't be exchanged, so we had to buy all new tickets. I would have used the card my parents gave me, but of course it wasn't working. I bought my two tickets (Krakow to Belfast, Belfast to Paris), and the sum was immense. Our flight was leaving shortly (we had about 40 minutes to get through security), and just our luck: not ONLY were half of the groups' credit cards not working (they got locked after buying the first plane ticket), but the line for security was going OUT THE BUILDING. I tried to use my card to pay for a ticket for one of the girls who had NO cards working, but my card got locked as soon as I bought both of mine. We eventually split up; we had to cut in front of many hundreds of people in order to make it through security. The other girl was able to pay in cash, I think, so we got her up to us and made it through security. We made it to the gate with about 2 minutes to spare, and we ended up being the last ones on the airplane. Again.
We had about 40 minutes to kill in Belfast, so once we all got through security, we had lunch. Of course, the others were very, very slow at getting up. The Airport made a boarding call for our plane and I got up to go and the others asked me where I was going. I said that they just made the boarding call, but the other's just said "we have time! Chill out." So I sat back down in my chair and waited. I kept looking at the screen that had our flight info on it. About 2 minutes later, our flight info turned red and said "Final Boarding Call." I pointed it out to the others, and THEN they got up. We made it to the gate, and luckily there was still a line. As you may have guessed, we were the last ones on the airplane. Again.
